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WHY THE CIVIL WAR STILL MATTERS
BY JAMES McPHERSON
Even before the many conferences, commemorations, books,
and other public events associated with bicentennial of Abraham
Lincoln’s birth in 2009 and now the current sesquicentennial
observations of the Civil War, the American
Civil War was the most popular historical
subject in many parts of the United
States. Back in the 1980s, the historian
at the Vicksburg National Military Park
declared “Americans just can’t get enough
of the Civil War.” A bookstore owner in
Falls Church, Virginia, said—also in the
1980s—“For the last two years Civil War
books have been flying out of here. It’s
not just the buffs who buy; it’s the general
James McPherson
public, from high school kids to retired
people.” Civil War books are the leading sellers for the History
Book Club. In 1990 some thirty million viewers watched the Ken
Burns eleven hours of television documentary on the Civil War, and
re-broadcasts in the past twenty years have lifted the number to at
least fifty million in the United States and abroad. Some 40,000
Americans are estimated to be Civil War re-enactors, who re-enact
battles every year before thousands of spectators at or near where
they took place 150 years ago.
What accounts for this intense interest in the fratricidal
conflict that almost tore the country apart, an interest that is
even greater now during these years in which we will observe
150th anniversaries of the war’s main events? First, perhaps, was
the sheer size of the conflict, fought not in some foreign land as
most American wars have been, but on battlefields ranging from
Pennsylvania to New Mexico and from Florida to Kansas, hallowed
ground that Americans can visit today. Then there is the drama
and tragedy of the war’s human cost—at least 620,000 soldiers
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plus an unknown number of civilians who lost their lives in the
war, recently revised by a demographic historian to an estimated
750,000. To help you understand the immensity of that figure, it
was 2% or more of the American population in 1860. If 2% of
Americans were to be killed in a war fought today, the number of
American war dead would be more than six million. Or to take
another statistic: 23,000 Union and Confederate soldiers were
killed, wounded, or missing in a single day at the battle of Antietam
on September 17, 1862. This was nearly four times the number
of American casualties on another famous single day in American
history, D-Day on June 6, 1944. The human cost of the Civil War
cast a long shadow forward in our history, and continues to horrify
us but also solemnly to impress us 150 years later.
Then there are the larger-than-life, near mythical individuals
on both sides whose lives and careers continue to fascinate us
today—Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, Stonewall
Jackson, William Tecumseh Sherman and Clara Barton—and on
and on. There is a kind of romance and glory, as well as tragedy,
about these people and their times that is hard to resist.
This drama and romance and tragedy help explain why the
Civil War remains such a popular subject, but they don’t entirely
explain why that war still matters to us today, 150 years later. To
start getting at that, I hope you will forgive a little autobiography on
my part to account for how and why I became interested in the Civil
War, when I was in graduate school, a half century ago—because
it was for many of the same reasons why the war still matters to us
today, fifty years later.
Unlike many of my friends and colleagues, I did not have a
youthful fascination with the Civil War. When I arrived in Baltimore
in 1958 for graduate study at Johns Hopkins University, I had not
read anything specifically on the subject apart from a couple of
books by Bruce Catton. I had not taken a college course on the Civil
War because my small college in Minnesota did not offer such a
course.
I had a vague and rather naïve interest in the history of the
South, in part because, having been born in North Dakota and
brought up in Minnesota, I found the South exotic and mysterious.
During my senior year in college, nine black students integrated
Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas under the protection of
the United States Army. I was well enough acquainted with history
and current events to know that the constitutional basis for these
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students’ presence at Central High was the Fourteenth Amendment,
one of the most important products of the Civil War and of the
Reconstruction period that followed it. In retrospect, it seems likely
that this awareness planted the seeds of my interest in the Civil War
era.
That seed germinated within days of my arrival at Johns
Hopkins, when like other incoming graduate students, I met
with a prospective academic adviser. Mine was Professor C. Vann
Woodward, the foremost historian of the American South, whose
book The Strange Career of Jim Crow became almost the bible of the
civil rights movement. My appointment was postponed for a day
because Woodward had been called to Washington to testify before
a Congressional committee about potential problems in Little Rock
as a second year of school desegregation got under way. Here was
a revelation; a historian offering counsel on the most important
domestic issue of the day. If I had not seen the connection between
the Civil War and my own times before, I certainly discovered it then.
That consciousness grew during my four years in Baltimore.
The last two of those years were also the opening phase of the
commemoration of the Civil War centennial. But that made little
impression on me except for the initial events in Charleston, South
Carolina, in April 1961 when a black delegate from New Jersey’s
centennial commission was denied a room at the Francis Marion
Hotel. In protest, several Northern delegations walked out of the
events, boycotting them until President John F. Kennedy offered
the integrated facilities at the Charleston Naval Base. This offer
provoked the Southern delegates to secede from the national
commission and hold their own events at the hotel. It all seemed
like déjà vu.
Apart from that incident, the civil rights movement eclipsed
the centennial observations during the first half of the 1960s. These
were the years of sit-ins and freedom rides in the South, of Southern
political leaders vowing what they called “massive resistance” to
national laws and court decisions, of federal marshals and troops
trying to protect civil rights demonstrators, of conflict and violence,
of the March on Washington in August 1963, when Martin Luther
King Jr. stood before the Lincoln Memorial and began his “I Have
a Dream” speech with the words: “Five score years ago, a great
American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the
Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a
great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had
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been scarred in the flame of withering injustice.” These were also
the years of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of
1965, which derived their constitutional basis from the Fourteenth
and Fifteenth Amendments adopted a century earlier. The creation
of the Freedmen’s Bureau by the federal government in 1865 to aid
the transition of four million slaves to freedom, was the first largescale intervention by the government in the field of social welfare.
It was the parallels between the 1960s and 1860s, and the
roots of events in my own time in events of exactly a century
earlier, that propelled me to become a historian of the Civil War
and Reconstruction. I became convinced that I could not fully
understand the issues and events of my own time unless I learned
about their roots in the years of the Civil War: slavery and its
abolition; the conflict between the North and South; the struggle
between state sovereignty and the federal government; the role of
the government in social change and social welfare, and resistance
to both government and to social welfare. Those issues are as salient
and controversial today as they were in the 1960s, not to mention
the 1860s. Today, we have an African American president of the
United States, which would not have been possible without the
civil rights movement of a half-century ago, which in turn would
not have been possible without the events of the Civil War and
Reconstruction Era. Many of the issues over which the Civil War
was fought still resonate today: matters of race and citizenship;
regional rivalries; the relative powers and responsibilities of federal,
state, and local governments. The first section of the Fourteenth
Amendment, which among other things conferred American
citizenship on anyone born in the United States, has become
controversial today because of growing concern about illegal
immigration. As the great Southern novelist William Faulkner once
said: “The past is not dead; it is not even the past.”
Let’s take a closer look at some of those aspects of the Civil
War that are neither dead nor past. At first glance, it appeared that
Northern victory in the war resolved two fundamental, festering
issues that had been left unresolved by the Revolution of 1776 that
had given birth to the nation: first, whether this fragile republican
experiment called the United States would survive as one nation,
indivisible; and second, whether the house divided would continue
to endure half slave and half free. Both of these issues had remained
open questions until 1865. Many Americans in the early decades
of the country’s history were concerned about whether the nation
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would break apart; many European conservatives predicted its
demise; some Americans had advocated the right of secession and
periodically threatened to invoke it; eleven states did invoke it in
1861. But since 1865 no state or region has seriously threatened
secession, not even during the decade of “massive resistance”
to desegregation from 1954 to 1964. When I say seriously, I
don’t mean to deny that some groups and individuals have
indeed threatened secession, but how serious they are is open to
question—for example the current governor of Texas, Rick Perry,
who has openly asserted his state’s right to secede, but somewhat
inconsistently ran for the Republican nomination for president of
the United States!
By the 1850s the United States, which had been founded
on a charter that declared all men created equal with an equal
title of liberty, had become the largest slaveholding country in the
world, making a mockery of this country’s professions of freedom
and equal rights. As Abraham Lincoln put it in a speech in 1854,
“the monstrous injustice of slavery … deprives our republican
example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies
of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites.”
But with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and the
Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1865, that particular
“monstrous injustice” and “hypocrisy” has existed no more. Yet the
legacy of slavery in the form of racial discrimination and prejudice
long plagued the United States, and has not entirely disappeared a
century and a half later.
In the process of preserving the Union of 1776 while purging
it of slavery, the Civil War also transformed it. Before 1861, the
words “United States” were a plural noun: “the United States have
a republican form of government.” Since 1865 the United States
is a singular noun. The U.S. was a world power. The North went
to war to preserve the Union; it ended by creating a nation. This
transformation can be traced in Lincoln’s most important wartime
addresses. His first inaugural address, in 1861, contained the word
“Union” twenty times and the word “nation” not once. In Lincoln’s
first message to Congress, on July 4, 1861, he used the word Union
32 times and nation only three times. In his famous public letter to
Horace Greeley of August 22, 1862, concerning slavery and the war,
Lincoln spoke of the Union eight times and the nation not at all.
But in the brief Gettysburg Address fifteen months later, he did not
refer to the Union at all but used the word nation five times. And in
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the second inaugural address, looking back over the trauma of the
past four years, Lincoln spoke of one side seeking to dissolve the
Union in 1861 and the other side accepting the challenge of war to
preserve the nation.
The decentralized antebellum republic, in which the post
office was the only agency of national government that touched
the average citizen, was transformed by the crucible of war
into a centralized polity that taxed people directly and created
an internal revenue bureau to collect the taxes, expanded the
jurisdiction of federal courts, created a national currency and a
federally chartered banking system, drafted men into the army,
and created the Freedmen’s Bureau as the first national agency
for social welfare. Eleven of the first twelve amendments to the
Constitution had limited the powers of the national government;
most of them contained some form of the words that the federal
government “shall not” have certain powers. Most of the next
fifteen constitutional amendments, starting with the Thirteenth
Amendment in 1865, contain the words that the federal
government “shall have the power” to enforce these provisions.
The first three of the post-Civil War constitutional amendments
transformed four million slaves into citizens and voters with five
years, the most rapid and fundamental social transformation in
American history—even if the nation did backslide on part of this
commitment for three generations after 1877.
From 1789 to 1861, a Southern slaveholder had been president
of the United States two-thirds of those years, and two-thirds of the
speakers of the House and presidents pro tem of the Senate had also
been Southerners. Twenty of the thirty-five Supreme Court justices
during that period had been from slave states, which always had
a majority on the Court before 1861. After the Civil War a century
passed before another resident of a Southern state was elected
president—Lyndon Johnson in 1964. For half of a century after
the war only one Southerner served as Speaker of the House and
none as president pro tem of the Senate. Only five of the twentysix Supreme Court justices appointed during that half-century were
Southerners. The institutions and ideology of a plantation society
and a slave system that had dominated half of the country before
1861 and sought to dominate more went down with a great crash in
1865 and were replaced by the institutions and ideology of free-labor
entrepreneurial capitalism. For better or for worse, the flames of Civil
War forged the framework of modern America.
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That last point requires some elaboration. Before 1865
two distinct socioeconomic and cultural systems competed for
dominance within the body politic of the United States. Although
in retrospect the triumph of free-labor capitalism seems to have
been inevitable, that was by no means clear for most of the
antebellum generation. Not only did the institutions and ideology
of the rural, agricultural, plantation South based on slave labor
dominate the United States government during most of that time,
but the territory of the slave states also considerably exceeded that
of the free states before 1859 and the Southern drive for further
territorial expansion seemed more aggressive than that of the North.
Most of the slave states seceded from the United States in 1861
not only because they feared the potential threat to the long-term
survival of slavery posed by Lincoln’s election, but also because
they looked forward to the expansion of a dynamic, independent
slaveholding polity into new territory by the acquisition of
Cuba and perhaps more of Mexico and Central America. If the
Confederacy had prevailed in the 1860s, it is quite possible that the
emergence of the United States as the world’s leading industrial as
well as agricultural producer by the end of the nineteenth century
and as the world’s most powerful nation in the twentieth century
might never have happened. That it did happen is certainly one of
the most important legacies of the Civil War—not only for America,
but also for the world.
The explosive growth of industrial capitalism in the postCivil War generation was not an unmixed blessing. Labor strife and
exploitation of workers became endemic. Violence characterized
many strikes and efforts by management to break the strikes. At
the same time, the Civil War had left the South impoverished, its
agricultural economy in shambles and the freed slaves in a limbo
of second-class citizenship after the failure of Reconstruction in the
1870s to fulfill the promise of civil and political equality embodied
in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution.
Those amendments remained in the Constitution, however,
and the legacy of the national unity, a strong national government,
and a war for freedom inherited from the triumph of the 1860s
was revived again in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which
finally began the momentous process of making good on the
promises of a century earlier. Even though many white Southerners
for generations lamented the cause they had lost in 1865—indeed,
mourned the world they had lost, a world they romanticized into
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a vision of moonlight and magnolias—white as well as black
Southerners are today probably better off because they lost that war
than they would have been if they had won it. Some of them might
even admit as much.
No single word better expresses what Americans believe their
country has stood for from 1776 right down to the present than the
word “liberty.” The tragic irony of the Civil War is that both sides
professed to fight for the heritage of liberty bequeathed to them
by the Founding Fathers. North and South alike in 1861 wrapped
themselves in the mantle of 1776. But each side interpreted this
heritage in opposite ways—and at first neither side included the
slaves in the vision of liberty for which they fought. But the slaves
did; and by the time of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in 1863 the
North fought not merely for the liberty bequeathed to them by the
Founders but also for “a new birth of freedom.” These multiple
and varying meanings of liberty, and how they dissolved and reformed in kaleidoscope patterns during the war, provide the central
meaning of the war for the American experience.
Southern states invoked the example of their forefathers of
1776, who seceded from the British Empire in the name of liberty
to govern themselves. Southern secessionists proclaimed in 1861
that “the same spirit of freedom and independence that impelled
our Fathers to the separation from the British government,” would
impel the “liberty loving people of the South” to separation from
the United States. Jefferson Davis declared from “the high and
solemn motive of defending and protecting the rights which our
fathers bequeathed to us,” let us “renew such sacrifices as our
fathers made to the holy cause of constitutional liberty.”
One of the liberties for which Southern whites contended,
Lincoln had said sarcastically back in 1854, was the “liberty to make
slaves of other people.” In 1861 many Northerners also ridiculed
the Confederacy’s profession to be fighting for the same ideals
of liberty as their forefathers of 1776. That was “a libel upon the
whole character and conduct the men of ’76,” said the antislavery
poet and journalist William Cullen Bryant. Ignoring the fact that
many of the Founding Fathers owned slaves, Bryant claimed that
the Founders fought the revolution “to establish the rights of
man…and principles of universal liberty,” while the South in 1861
seceded “not in the interest of general humanity, but of a domestic
despotism…Their motto is not liberty, but slavery.”
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In 1864 Lincoln, as he often did, used a parable to make an
important point, in this case a point about the multiple meanings
of liberty. He did so in a speech at Baltimore, in a slave state that
had remained in the Union and was even then engaged in better
debates about a state constitutional to abolish slavery in Maryland
(which narrowly passed later that year, by the way). “The world has
never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American
people, just now, are much in want of one,” said Lincoln on this
occasion. “We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word
we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty
may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and
the product of his labor; while with others the same word may
mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the
product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but
incompatible things, called by the same name—liberty.” Lincoln
went on to illustrate his point with a parable about animals. “The
shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat,“ he said, “for
which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the
wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty,
especially as the sheep is a black one. Plainly the sheep and the wolf
are not agreed upon a definition of the word liberty; and precisely
the same difference prevails today among us human creatures, even
in the North, and all professing to love liberty. Hence we behold the
processes by which thousands are daily passing from under the yoke
of bondage, hailed by some as the advance of liberty, and bewailed
by others as the destruction of all liberty.”
The shepherd in this fable was, of course, Lincoln himself; the
black sheep was the slave, and the wolf his owner. As commander
in chief of an army of a million men, Lincoln wielded a great deal
of power, and by this stage of the war that power was being used
not only to defeat the Confederacy and preserve the Union, but also
to abolish slavery. But traditionally in American ideology, power
was the enemy of liberty. Americans had fought their revolution
to get free of the power of the British crown. “There is tendency
in all Governments to an augmentation of power at the expense
of liberty,” wrote James Madison. To curb this tendency, framers
of the Constitution devise a series of checks and balances that
divided power among three branches of the national government,
between two houses of Congress, and between the state and federal
governments as, in Madison’s words, an “essential precaution
in favor of liberty.” Even that was not enough; in the first ten
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amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the power of the
national government was further limited by all the “shall nots” in
those amendments. Through most of early American history, those
who feared the potential of power to undermine liberty remained
eternally vigilant against this threat. When the famous reformer of
the treatment of the mentally ill, Dorothea Dix, persuaded Congress
to pass a bill granting public lands to the states to subsidize mental
hospitals in 1854, President Franklin Pierce vetoed it in the name of
preserving liberty. For if Congress could do this, warned Pierce, “it
has the same power to provide for the indigent who are not insane,
and thus…the whole field of public beneficence is thrown open
to the care and culture of the Federal Government.” This would
mean, continued Pierce’s veto message, “all sovereignty vested in
an absolute consolidated central power, against which the spirit of
liberty has so often and in so many countries struggled in vain.”
The bill for mental hospitals, therefore, would be “the beginning
of the end…of our blessed inheritance of representative liberty.”
Proslavery Southerners like John C. Calhoun insisted on keeping
the national government weak, as insurance against a possible
antislavery majority in Congress at some future time that might
try to abolish or weaken slavery. State sovereignty, or state’s rights,
was a bulwark against this potential antislavery majority. The most
extreme manifestation of state sovereignty, of course, was secession
in the name of the liberty of Southern states and Southern people to
reject the federal government and form their own proslavery nation.
If this version of liberty was to be used to destroy the United States,
concluded most Northerners during the Civil War, then it was time
to take another look at the meaning of liberty.
To help us understand this change in attitude toward the
meaning of liberty, we can turn to the definitions offered by the
famous twentieth-century British philosopher Isaiah Berlin in an
essay titled “Two Concepts of Liberty.” The idea of negative liberty is
perhaps more familiar. It can be defined as the absence of restraint,
a freedom from interference by outside authority with individual
thought or behavior. Laws requiring automobile passengers to wear
seat belts or motorcyclists to wear helmets would be, under this
definition, to prevent them from enjoying the liberty to choose
not to wear seat belts or helmets. Negative liberty, therefore, can
be described as freedom from. Positive liberty, by contrast, can be
understood as freedom to. It is not necessarily incompatible with
negative liberty—freedom from interference with what a writer
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writes or a reader reads. But an illiterate person suffers from a
denial of positive liberty; he is unable to enjoy the freedom to write
or read whatever he pleases, not because he cannot read or write
anything. He suffers not the absence of a negative liberty—freedom
from—but of positive liberty—freedom to read and write. The
remedy lies not in removal of restraint but in achievement of the
capacity to read and write.
The Civil War accomplished a historic shift in American
values in the direction of positive liberty. The change from all those
“shall nots” in the first ten amendments to the Constitution to the
phrase “Congress shall have the power to enforce this provision” in
most of the post-Civil War amendments is indicative of that shift—
especially the Thirteenth Amendment, which liberated four million
slaves and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth, which guaranteed them
equal civil rights and political rights.
Abraham Lincoln played a crucial role in this historic change
toward positive liberty. Let us return to Lincoln’s parable of the
shepherd, the wolf, and the black sheep. “The shepherd drives
the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the
shepherd as a liberator.” Here is Lincoln the shepherd using the
power of government and the army to achieve a positive liberty for
the sheep. But the wolf was a believer in negative liberty, for to him
the shepherd was “the destroyer of liberty, especially as the sheep
was a black one.”
Positive liberty is an open-ended concept. It has the capacity
to expand toward notions of equity, justice, social welfare, equality
of opportunity. For how much liberty does a starving person enjoy,
except the liberty to starve? How much freedom of the press can
exist in a society of illiterate people? How free is a motorcyclist who
is paralyzed for life by a head injury that might have been prevented
if he had worn a helmet?
With the “new birth of freedom” invoked by Lincoln in the
Gettysburg Address, he helped move the nation toward an expanded
and open-ended concept of positive liberty. “On the side of the
Union,” Lincoln said on another occasion, this war “is a struggle
for maintain in the world, that form, and substance of government,
whose leading objective is, to elevate the condition of men—to lift
artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable
pursuit for all, to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in
the race of life.”
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The tension between negative and positive liberty did not
come to an end with the Civil War, of course. That tension has
remained a constant in American political and social philosophy.
In recent years, with the rise of the tea party and other smallgovernment or anti-government movements in our politics, there
has been a revival of negative liberty. The presidential election of
2012 pitted the concepts of positive and negative liberty against
each other more clearly than in any other recent election. How
this tension will play out, in the midst of our sesquicentennial
observations of the Civil War, remains to be seen. In any case, it is
another example of “Why the Civil War Still Matters.”